A progressive voice from the Carolinas, featuring views, news, and dialogue that the corporate media doesn't. In the Mountains of Western North Carolina, Mills River is a rural community about 20 minutes from Asheville.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

GOP: Unemployment Benefits "discourage people from looking for work."

Um, Hel-looo...GOP? People are desperate to find work - there are just very few jobs out there, let alone jobs paying a living wage! That's because YOU people - you dim-witted, selfish, greedy, multi-national congressional puppets sent every possible job to the third world! And none of y'all has done one damn thing to stop the outsourcing - no, make that hemorrhaging - of our jobs! Is everyone just supposed to work at McDonald's now? Or wait on rich millionaires like y'all, at your country clubs and chop houses? Or cleaning your palatial houses for third world wages? Yet we have these GOP geniuses like Rep. John Linder of GA (along with their yellow-bellied, yellow dog DINOs), calling the benefits, which average $320 per week, "too much of an allure." Yesiree, by golly, that big old hunk o'money (half the checks being less than $320.00) sure must be keeping our lazy asses on the couch! An amount of money that's barely enough to feed oneself, let alone keep the power on really makes that so tempting. Clearly that's the problem with the economy! Just us lazy, entitled people expecting big fancy paychecks and luxuries like health care for one's family - you know, pesky things that interfere with additional profits for the financial elites.

From Crooks and Liars:Sen. Whitehouse: Cutting People Off Unemployment To Make Them Find Jobs 'Is Just Plain Nuts'By Susie Madrak

Why are Republicans so consistently morally bereft? (And why do so many Democrats take their cue from them?) Thank heavens for senators like Sheldon Whitehouse, who speak so powerfully about the plight of the unemployed:

A trio of Senate Democrats took the floor Tuesday evening to denounce the Republican party for its unwillingness to add the cost of extended unemployment benefits to the deficit. Extended unemployment benefits put in place by the stimulus bill expired on June 1, interrupting checks for some 903,000 people so far.

"I understand the point about the debt and the deficit and the spending," said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). "But to me, that doesn't have an enormous amount of credibility, because when President Clinton left office, he left an annual surplus... At the end of [George W. Bush's] term, we had $9 trillion in debt."

"We would have none of this if it hadn't been for the Republican debt orgy that they went through," Whitehouse said.

There are currently five jobseekers for every available opening, but a major obstacle to reauthorizing currently-expired extended benefits has been deficit concerns supplemented by the suspicion that the benefits discourage people from looking for work. Rep. John Linder (R-Ga.) called the benefits, which average $320 per week, "too much of an allure." Democrats in both the House and Senate, too, have said business owners tell them they're having trouble hiring because of extended benefits.

Whitehouse confronted that argument.

"The notion that you're going to cut off somebody's unemployment insurance and have them go out and find a job is just plain nuts," said Whitehouse. "There aren't a lot of people lying around enjoying the luxury of unemployment insurance payments. They want to be getting to work...." Read the rest at Crooks and Liars.

2 Comments:

Sounds ominously like the hyperbole started in earnest back in the late 1970s when Ronald Reagan touted the overabundance of welfare queens who were milking the system dry and driving the country into bankruptcy. I guess today's unemployed workers, through no fault of their own (well, except for those electing right-wingers the last three decades), are the new "welfare queens" -- the scourge of the earth; the scapegoats for our economic upheaval.

“In the councils of government we must guard against
the acquisition of power, whether sought or unsought,
by the military industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties and democratic processes.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower
from his final address to the nation
January 17, 1961

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
--Thomas Jefferson